


An Empty Stage

by vaspider



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 06:01:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaspider/pseuds/vaspider
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Capitol falls, Caesar Flickerman's career presents him with choices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Empty Stage

  
_There is something about an empty stage_ , he thought to himself. _Something beautiful and unrealized in that empty soundset, something about the hush of an area devoid of spectators. Potential energy._

He would, from time to time in the years before, step out onto that empty stage the night before the Tribute Parade, just to hear the click of his heels against the stage, echoing out into the darkness of that unlit arena. The first time he stepped out across the flat matte surface that so soon would hold himself, this year's chosen guest commentator, the President himself, he felt only that hum of potential, like an electric current that ran up through the stage, into the soles of his feet. Watched the running lights from catwalks above as they dimly reflected from highly-polished cobalt-leather shoes, the subtle glint of one off of the edge of his left hand's pinky ring. Cherished that moment, like the moment the next day when he paused, just off-stage, his shoes on the dark line that separated stage from backstage. Ready to step out into the brilliant light, ready for the crowd's adulation. One step forward from potential to actual. The show begins.

The next year, not so simple. Not merely filled with the sheer potential of being Host, no: now he had the echoing in his ears of eleven cannon shots, eleven times when he feared -- for all that his entire career to this point had built, plank by plank, like building the Capitol up from the muck and mire the Rebellion left behind -- that those carefully-practiced masques he'd built up would slip. 

That he would stare too long, that slick words would slip no longer from his lips to the microphone imbedded along the collar of his suit, calibrated to pick up his voice whichever way he turned his head, to auto-tune its volume when his rose and fell so it could pick up the slighest whisper without becoming overwhelmed by a sudden cry, a sudden shout. 

After his fourth year as Host, he stepped out onto the dark stage, preparing for the Quarter Quell, and it seemed to him every click of his heels on those boards was not just echoed but ghosted, as if each footstep did not just repeat back to him but followed itself with so many other, smaller footsteps, forever stilled. You're just being dramatic, he reassured himself, turning his face up toward the screens where Panem's most decorated, most fortunate citizens would, tomorrow, get a glimpse of fourty-three children doomed to brutal deaths, and one -- one sharp-eyed ruffian from the last extant district -- who would survive. 

Overwhelming, that number. More children gone than he had years in his life, more children gone in a handful of days than he had years. His resignation carefully written, rested on his desk for days after the Quarter Quell. It rested on his desk until, certain he would turn it in today, he returned to his study, pulled open the door, and was assaulted by the smell of roses. 

A single white rose in a bud vase held down the letter's corner, while tossed atop it, casually, a candid shot of his ex, their daughters' heads leaned on her shoulders. The opened collar of of the Peacekeeper uniform on his ex. 

He understood, without a word being said. _The show must go on, and for the show to go on, it must have a Host._ He would smile with teeth so bright they nearly blinded on the monitors, he would laugh bigger than everyone else. He would sell, over and over again, the state-sanctioned murder of children.

  
 _Or else._ Or else the wide-eyed girls with their coal-black curls would find themselves in a District, tugged along behind a parent suddenly reassigned. Would find would find themselves counted somehow amoung that district's children.

  
After that, somehow, they were all his children, every one. Every question, every smile flashed out over a laughing crowd during the interviews: he poured every ounce of himself into selling these children the way a broker sells homes. Emphasizing the odds of each, praising them as investments to the sponsors whose gifts would keep, no matter what, only one of them alive.

  
Fingers gripping the edge of the Tribute Tower's stone roof, he pushed himself up, shoes balanced on the ledge. At this height, winds cut through a body, cold no matter the time of year, and below him, The Capital lay spread out before him like a diva's sequined and electric-lighted gown, glittering and shimmering. Only in the distance, out there beyond the horizon, did plumes of smoke and the incoming traceries of aircraft, bright in the dark like spotlights shining elsewhere on the stage, about to turn in toward him. Rebels. 

He knew, the way an actor always knows, when the show had turned against him. When the Tributes joined hands and bowed, all together, that moment turned the show against them. Worse than a missed line, worse than being unable to sell that sham of a relationship, the lie of the baby, the show turned against him then, like the way that joyous exultations of cheering crowds are the slightest tone of inflection away from the screams of the dying.

  
The elaborate knot on his tie already undone, he tugged the sea-blue silk free, let it dribble like water from his fingers. It landed with a slight fuzz of static on the force-field that kept Tributes from flinging themselves down, rested there, blowing back and forth idly like a plastic bag, a tumbleweed in the wind's teeth-rattling cold.  


The Rebels would have their show, too. Their own sacrifice, blood upon the altar of their newfound freedom. And who, after Snow, but the man who smiled and smiled, who sold The Capitol the deaths of three hundred and sixty-two children? 

Perhaps a minute, perhaps an hour, he stood there, his hair never coming loose from its layers of peacock pomade laquering it into place. His hands folded over his stomach, pressing to his belly, toes squared up to the roof's edge. Fingers, toes, nose, all going, like the center of him, slowly numb. Slowly hollow. The rush of air past the shells of his ears bore the echoes of thirty years of cheering, so many bursts of laughter, and three hundred and sixty two final breaths. Distant firefights like so many cannons.

Beneath him, the diva's dress turned all to black, The Capitol's lights extinguished in a moment. His tie rippled off into the darkness, falling like a flag untethered down, down, down into the dark.  


Caesar Flickerman stepped forward.


End file.
